


Little Neon Limelight

by Anonymississippi



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst, Bars, Depression, Drug-Addiction, F/F, Kinda Vegas AU, PTSD, Prostitution, Suicide, farming, no powers, small town AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-15
Updated: 2017-04-15
Packaged: 2018-10-19 02:20:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10630146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anonymississippi/pseuds/Anonymississippi
Summary: Alex Danvers always shows back up around harvest season. Sure, she makes enough money on the bar circuit in the cities, but she still can't seem to shake her small-town Texas roots. Especially not since Astra, that insane ex-GI with the connection to Kara, bought the Lonestar bar and tried to keep it running.But this time, it's different. She's still singing on the weekends out at the Lonestar and packing the people in. She still plays as good as ever. And she's still got some sort of deal with Astra worked out, even though not many people 'round here talk about that kinda lifestyle.The big difference this time?Alex is sober.





	

**Author's Note:**

> im straight up telling you this is gonna be sad, but it's like Into the Woods, sorta... if we end it at the intermission (chapter 1) it's kinda happy. But then it goes to heck and back.

Alex rolled down South Main on her banged-up Ducati Monster Thursday, when temperatures broke a hundred and the humidity turned the town’s movements soupy and slow. Astra saw the glint of her black helmet through the window of the bar. Looking askance, she ran her index finger against her thick leather watchband as she continued wiping down beer glasses (while nursing a beer of her own), preparing for the handful of farmers lucky enough to get out of their tractor cabins before sundown. Traffic is absent in this wheezing, dying Texas town, save for harvest season, when green and yellow cotton-stripping machines overrun the streets—there are massive combines of red and black with pincer teeth clogging both lanes like plaque in jellied arteries, and one faded blue New Holland more rust than tractor that seizes each of the eight intersections along Main with seasonal inconsideration, bringing traffic to a standstill.

“What’s wrong?” J’onn asks, lugging the keg of Budweiser into the cabinet and setting to prep the hoses for the taps.

“Alex Danvers is back.” Astra attempts nonchalance as she whips the towel over a glass that she’s already dried. “Your protégé.”

“Some job I did,” he shrugs, not offering anything else to Astra. Not that she expected him to. Not after what Alex did.

“She’s an adult, J’onn. Not your fault,” Astra answers, setting the glass aside and throwing the dish towel over top her shoulders. She crosses her arms over her chest and leans against the bar, staring down at her stained apron. She can already feel her buzz fading and the fatigue setting in, and it’s barely seven o’clock (not that the farmers will be in tonight, since they’re harvesting from dawn to dusk). Saul is down at the corner stool watching pre-season football, well into his sixth drink of the evening.

Besides him, the place is empty. The bar itself isn’t anything impressive, really—there’s cracked, red leather circular stools and shellacked maple tables and overlarge neon signs, black walls and dented floorboards and too many mistakes to count. One uneven pool table stands lonely and abandoned in the back corner, and ashtrays fill the dingy, dim air with an unpleasant odor of menthol and futility. The platform that functions as stage has been painted over black a few times, but the corners of the plywood are beginning to splinter. Whenever musicians plug into the cheap audio system, static crackles through a half-busted monitor like old a.m. radio stations.

Astra doesn’t like to linger over where she ended up, or how, or why. It’s no Dallas, or Houston, or hell, no Opal City, where she’d been born, raised, gone to school and set off across the ocean. This tiny town in east Texas is nowhere for Kara to succeed, and there’s nothing here for Alex to come back to. But the place is hardly passive. It wears on a body, agitates, the closeness and the vastness all at once contradictory—freeing, inhibiting, miles of land and no one to talk to, a neighbor on every corner but no one to confide in. Nothing to do but drink the pain away, and seek contentment, if it ever existed… and on the plus side, she gets to see Kara, sometimes. She sees Alex for a few weeks out of the year, and tells herself she’s not a terrible person even though she doesn’t believe it.

Neither does J’onn.

“Alex can make her own decisions,” Astra continues, rubbing the back of her neck to work out a kink that formed when she fell asleep over the ledger, wondering how much… how many men… if it would really be worth it this season. They’re tired and she’s _always_ tired, but lying on her back and faking it is a lot less work than what she’s done in the past.

“Does that make you feel better, when you lie to yourself?” J’onn scolds her, and she doesn’t want to meet his face. His stern, stubborn scowl always leaves her feeling small. It reminds her of her C.O.’s sneer from her discharge hearing, when they’d stripped her of her medals and sent her packing with nothing to show for her twelve years in Afghanistan but a scar in the middle of her chest, a head full of PTSD, and the demons that came with it. Shortly thereafter, she became an alcoholic, which is one practice she can say she’s taken to with diligence.

“Alex is in no condition to be looking out for herself. Kara didn’t think so this time last year.”

“We can’t force her to stay here if she doesn’t want to,” Astra protests. “You know better than anyone trying to tell Alexandra—”

“Alex needs help,” J’onn interrupts, moving back under the counter. “And so do you. But I’m done beating a dead horse.”

“Go ahead and keep beating, J’onn,” Astra mumbles, shuffling toward the back office, ready to pour something a helluva lot stronger than beer. “I’m used to it.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

“You still need a weekend act?” Alex asks three days later.

She lets herself into the back office where Astra’s slept, too tired to make it to the apartment upstairs. She spent the whole night plying Stephen Comfort and Geoffrey Powers with enough drinks for them to tip her so she can make the back payments on the electricity bill. Stevey-boy got handsy and Astra let him, because he feels guilty, and so he slips her another twenty dollars at the end of the night. She’s prettier than his wife, and doesn’t have three kids hanging off of her—a lot less snot-covered flesh to feel up when he’s making a grab for her ass. He blushes when he drinks and would never ask to take it farther, but Astra almost wishes he would. She’d probably make more with him than she’s done with Russell Green and Jay Larson, both of whom have families, but neither of which harbor a sense of loyalty or morality, thus engendering the guilt-trip tips. It’s a bad game and she needs out, but she doesn’t have many other options.

Ex-G.I.

Ex-con.

Alcoholic.

TBI and open-heart surgery, all before thirty-five, when the crow’s feet just start to spread from the almond creases of her grey-green eyes.

Debt.

Depression.

A seasonal affair with a junkie closer to Kara than she is. An addiction to that girl, and that taste, that makes her feel like she’s worthy again.

“You offering?” Astra asks, jolting herself back to the conversation at hand and wondering how Alex will play it this year.

Friendly in public, frigid after sex? Is Astra worth a smile at the bar? Suggestive motions with the cue stick, and another vigorous round of foreplay on the pool table, to see if they can balance out what shifted when they got carried away last time? Will she get the half-whispered, half-sobbed apologies after Alex puts her hand over her mouth to keep her quiet while she fucks her open? Will she get another tourniquet on her arm and all of Alex’s sins in their shared needle?

One time, Alex held her. Close enough to absorb, close enough to remember.

She’ll never forget it.

“Yeah, just… not like last time.”

“You came to me with the terms,” Astra checks her, because that’s how this whole thing started.

(Alex Danvers. Little Al. Jeremiah’s kid, you know, the one out near Hector’s land? Her mom teaches biology at the county school. Yeah, her, you know she went sour real fast, right? After Jeremiah’s—uh-huh, couple’a counties over at the gin—kinda gruesome, y’know? Well, her and ‘Liza didn’t take it good. She was outta here every weekend, caught up with some kids in Houston, or—naw, she went on across to Austin, didn’t she? Grabbed that guitar and—yeah, the wreck off the Interstate with the Donahue girl—that was Alex. And right after they’d taken in that foster kid from up north, too. Shit came down hard all at once on that family, bless their hearts, but Lord if Alex don’t bring you to tears with those songs. Kinda got in with that new lady—soldier hallucinating and going off, that’s kid’s aunt who came in and bought the bar…but Alex, though, she’s playing up at the Lonestar later, you wanna check it out?)

“I can’t…” Alex shoves her hands in her pockets and Astra blinks through the fog, lifts her head from her hands and hates herself for not getting in her own bed for the third time this week. “I, uh, kinda promised I wouldn’t do that anymore.”

“Listen, I—do you wanna play your sets or not?” Astra asks, running weary fingers through her curls. They’re tangled and she feels _old_ , sitting in a rickety office chair that leans back too far, that gives Alex some unspeakable advantage in this negotiation, one they’ve only officially had once before, and even then, not much was said.

(“How much do you charge for the evening?” Astra had asked, four years ago, almost to the day. A Sunday afternoon. Bright September, so everything still felt steamy. “No way I can risk a cover; I can’t give them any kind of incentive not to show.”

“I, uhm, I don’t need cash,” Alex had mumbled, jittering a little, her pupils overlarge and glassy. “You, uh, you know how you—you’re just so—”

“I’m not getting you drugs.”

“No, that’s not… I’m okay, I promise, I just, uh, people kinda… they talk about harvest,” Alex had said, stepping closer, eyeing her like she might salivate, like she might just whimper at a touch. “Men put up the tractors late, and, uhm, sometimes your truck’s out at Jay Larson’s shop.”

“You wanna speak plain?”

“I don’t w-want m-money for the gigs,” Alex had stuttered, her face red despite the fact that her body looked pale under her cut-offs and off-white tank top, despite the fact that she was sweating bullets and her pupils were flitting glazed and bright like fireflies in dark fields. She’d probably taken a hit just to get through this fucked-up negotiation, if one could call this stammering and tip-toeing a ‘negotiation.’ “I want you to… I’ll play, and… I’m pretty good, so… charge a five-dollar cover for the under-21s only, Kara’s friends in high school think I’m like, rock ‘n roll or some shit, and all Dad’s old buddies drink a lot when I play the classics—”

“Alex,” Astra had stopped her then, pushing back from the desk to stand and grab the red apron, the same one she had on four years later. “Doesn’t matter how good you are if I can’t pay you. I can hardly keep the doors open once they’re back in the fields until November.”

Alex had lurched across the room and stayed Astra’s hands, gripping the apron strings and curling her fingers over Astra’s waist where the ties should’ve gone. She hooked her finger in a belt loop and Astra sucked in breath through her nose when Alex put her thumb against the metal zipper of her jeans.

“You…” Alex mumbled low, and Astra felt like she’d been shot again. “I want you for a night, or two, or—”

“Alex—”

Alex had kissed her, and Astra had let her, and somewhere in their ‘negotiation’ four years ago, Astra found herself with her pants around her ankles and Alex’s hand between her legs, biting down on Alex’s clavicle hard enough to bleed when she came. Alex kissed the blood away and played the next night. Nearly 75 people from the county showed up to the Lonestar Bar, and Astra netted two grand easy. So she dropped to her knees and hitched Alex’s leg over her shoulder while Alex shut her eyes and kept silent, which paid her back in full for bringing in business.

It’s been happening ever since.)

“You know I can’t…” Astra looked down at her books and wanted to sink back into simple arithmetic. Even if what came in would never match what went out, the rote of it all was comforting in ways talking with anyone—least of all, Alex—never was. “I can’t afford you. Not like what you play for in Denver, and Phoenix, and your Little Hollywoods out west.”

“I know you can’t, that’s why I… why the other deal was good before. But now, I… well, they gave me this.” Alex pulls out some plastic chip that looks like poorly designed casino fare. It’s purple with a damn silver-plated triangle and the number 6 in the middle, ‘to thine own self be true’ embossed round the edge.

“You’re sober?”

“Yeah,” Alex shrugs and runs a hand through her cropped hair. It looks properly cut, straight, as if Alex hadn’t hacked away at it herself. As if Astra hadn’t scratched her scalp and pulled so hard on those strands her short brown locks hadn’t littered her pillowcase. Alex does look tanner now, more muscle to her, but still lean and gorgeous as ever. Healthy. Clean. Like she doesn’t need what Astra can give her anymore, which, in the long run, is probably a good thing. “I mean, the same dude who gave me that chip gave me his old bong, but I’m off the hard stuff.” Alex knocks an absent knuckle against the hard top of Astra’s second-hand desk as she chews on her lip. She shrugs, sighs, and continues: “Listen, I… I can’t do that to them again. After last year, when Kara found me out at the shop—”

“I get it,” Astra says, nodding, standing, reaching for her apron—it’s all happening again, but Alex stays put this time, doesn’t lurch across to grab, or kiss, or moan clandestine desires against Astra’s neck, ashamed and grateful for the chance of it all. “Good for you, then.”

“I still want to play if—if you’re looking.”

“I thought you were done with destructive behavior?”

“…you know I can’t stay away from you,” Alex confesses.

Astra feels her fingers falter as she loops the scratchy material into bunny ears at the small of her back. Her chest feels inexplicably warm, and her throat feels like she’s just taken a shot of whiskey straight. “First time you’ve ever said anything.” She looks at her ledger when she says it, as if the numbers might compute Alex’s love of their own accord.

“I don’t want it to be how it’s been, like, like we’re something to be _ashamed_ of—”

“We’re not anything, Alex,” Astra says, fiddling with the ties of her apron, wondering how she’s going to be able to afford Alex’s set now that she might actually have to pay her in genuine American bills. “We can’t—I—not with Kara—”

“Fine,” Alex nods, sucking her lips in to nervously gnaw on them with her teeth once more. She exhales, something like a whistle, and props her hands on her hips as she comes to a decision. “Just gimme beer while I’m here for the season and we’ll call it even?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be sober?”

“One day at a time,” Alex mumbles, slipping out the office door and leaving Astra to her bar.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“How ‘bout some Otis to keep y’all going? Coffee and cigarettes on me,” Alex mumbles around the lip of her plastic cup while she drinks luke-warm beer and the room turns, gravitates, orbiting back to her sound when she kisses the mic and strums a chord on her dad’s old Epiphone Casino.

“She still sounds good,” Astra says to the girl in the back, the one with a notepad propped on her knee, the one with daisies on her dress.

“She sounds better, I think,” Kara says, scribbling a bit before flipping the lid of the pad closed and setting it aside. “Can I get a water?”

“Of course.”

“She plays better, that’s for sure. Less shaking.”

Astra rattles the plastic scoop against the ice in the cooler and extracts the soda gun to fill Kara’s glass with clear liquid.

“Her slides sound crisp, and she’s not so flat on some notes. She called me from Vegas a month ago to check in and tell me about her gig.” Kara’s sighs are monumental breaths, as if she’s forcibly expelling all the rotten air she breathes (as if any air taken in by Kara wouldn’t be purified instantaneously, no matter how sourly tainted). “Good pay, bad atmosphere—said she had to leave to keep up her meetings.”

“Is that what she told you, or the _Gazette_?”

“Just me,” Kara answers, squeezing the lemon slice Astra stuck on the rim that her niece never had to ask for, but that she knows to add anyway. Lemonade in Opal City summers at the park was lifetimes ago, _actual_ lifetimes, if you count Alura’s illness—but they’re back together now, even if they’re not whole, and even if Alex is wedged solidly between them. “I’d never put that in the _Gazette_.”

“Sounds like a good human-interest piece.”

“Around here, you know that’s just a euphemism for gossip.”

“Yeah, well, so’s the Baptist Ladies’ prayer chain. Church-sanctioned gossip, under the guise of praying for people’s wellbeing, but it’s still _gossip_ ,” Astra protests. She thinks of the whispers, the stares when she got into town, the rejections from the city clerk’s office to the high school, all the way down to the bagging lanes at the Piggly Wiggly. Nobody wants to hire an ex-con, let alone sit quietly beside her and pray for her soul. Astra wonders how many heads would explode if she walked in for Sunday service.

She’s the nut-job who shot people in the desert across the ocean and took shrapnel to the chest, the skull, her abdomen… pretty much half of her whole body. She’s also the ex-con who sent two men to the hospital in a bar-brawl on her way down from Arlington. The estranged aunt who didn’t take leave, who didn’t come back for Kara when her mom (her twin sister, her soulmate, half of who she was) _died_. Astra mulls over other titles (slut, adrenaline junkie, schizo, lesbo, bitch, whore, etc.) the church biddies have for her while she listens to Alex sing. Hearing that voice and watching those fingers on the strings makes the names sting less, nothing like welts left from sticks and stones when lyrics smooth it all over, and Astra supposes it’s all the heaven she needs.

But then she looks at Kara at the bar, and hates how stale and bumbling their interactions have been when they were once so full of warmth; Sunday afternoons were spent swinging as high as the clouds and racing round see-saw at one of the parks in Opal City (and, if Kara was a good girl and didn’t tell her mommy, they’d go and get an iced lemonade from the lemonade stand). Now Kara is grown, a far cry from the blonde girl in pigtails that would launch herself into Astra’s arms and wouldn’t let her go for hours, not until Kara was sick with exhaustion and Astra could hardly hold her anymore. Alura always hated her entrance: when she’d drop her bag at the door, still dressed in her fatigues, and throw her arms open wide for Kara to sprint into, even after Alura had specifically been through the _No Running Inside!_ rule prior to the arrival. Astra has lost that Kara, and been gifted with one she’s still learning about. Alex had the privilege of knowing her, as did this town. But Astra chose duty over privilege ( _coward_ , she thinks to herself, for not coming back and facing Alura’s death when she should have, for not stepping up for Kara when it was her turn). She thinks of all she’s missed and all that’s happened to her in the interim—the space between iced lemonades and lemon water at a Texas bar—and then she thinks maybe she does need praying-for.

“And didn’t I see that the _Gazette_ is down to three days now?” Astra clears her throat, wondering if there will ever be a day in this bar when she doesn’t feel like a failure.

“Can’t expect a weekly to sell like it used to, even in a place like this.”

“Which is all the more reason the mayor won’t be happy you passed up an article on the local celebrity.”

“Cat can get over herself, this is a conflict of interest,” Kara answers, stirring the lemon pulp into the water, picking at seeds with her fingernails. “She’s my _sister_. I’m not airing her dirty laundry.”

“Conflicts of interest likely don’t matter to the editor of all the county dailies—who nightlights as the _mayor_.”

Astra wipes down the countertop in front of Kara and then shuffles toward the register to close out Tammy Joe, Carla Green and Loretta, come in for ladies night specials and to hear Alex. Carla doesn’t make eye contact when Astra swipes her card, and Tammy Joe looks downright murderous. No surprise there. Astra’s Lonestar is the only bar in town, and she’s the only full-time bartender… she sunk all her money into the shit-hole when no one would hire her, but she sure as hell wasn’t leaving Kara again. Plus, she can’t much help that Carla’s husband pays more money for a blowjob than he ever would a beer. Consequently, Astra doesn’t make friends easy.

But Kara’s yet to find out about her jobs on the side, and if Astra has it her way, she never will. Talk about a story for Mayor Grant to sink her claws into. Grant already hates Astra for Afghanistan, for Kara going into the system, for circumstances that were so far beyond her control there was simply nothing for her to do.

For Christ’s sake, she didn’t even get to bury her _sister_.

But Astra’s condemned for leaving and staying gone, instead of returning the instant Alura got worse, the second the state came for Kara. Grant likes Kara, likes her enough to give her the tools to get outta here, even if she feels compelled to stay out of some bizarre sense of loyalty to dying country life. Eliza, the woman who stepped in when Astra couldn’t, and Alex, the girl who supported her when Astra failed, and this town, the stagnant place with nothing to offer, gets all of Kara’s smiles and efforts while leaching the life away from her… from anyone who stays, really. Grant’s got contacts in Dallas, and eyes on bigger offices than what the courthouse provides. Astra hopes she takes Kara with her, hopes maybe Grant can give Kara a way to save herself when Astra never could.

She can’t get out now; she’s too old, too haunted. Alex keeps trying, but she’s younger, stronger, with something more than nostalgia that makes her return. And Kara… God, Kara needs to run far away and never look back.

“You’re coming by the house Tuesday night, aren’t you?”

“I wasn’t sure Eliza was—didn’t know if it would be the usual crew,” Astra mutters, watching the trio of whispering women waddle toward the exit and throw bitter glances back at her. Their smudged eye liner and mismatched blush throw them into stark relief against the neon, like furies preparing to swoop down and peck Astra limbs apart.

“I’ve got some new, sort of,” Kara says. “It would be nice to share it with everybody at once. And, uhm, Alex is staying back at the house now. Her mom’s gonna let her.”

“Right, well, six months sobriety deserves some kind of reward.”

“She showed up at the DuPont outpost to meet with J’onn Friday afternoon.”

“What? Why?”

“Looking into coming back. There’s been an opening for a lab tech for almost four months, and she’s only two credits shy of her degree—”

“Why would she come back here?” Astra interrupts Kara even as her gaze flits to Alex when she finishes, when she nods and reaches for her beer and checks the room, just to make sure most of the easily-scandalized prudes have hit the road for the evening. The applause dies down, and Alex lifts her drink high to toast, her jet black guitar pick digging deep creases into the skin of her calloused fingers.

“Alright, y’all. This one goes out to the motherfucker who breaks your heart every damn time.”

She looks straight at Astra as she says it, and the flashback of a Saturday morning at a Holiday Inn Express right off the Interstate hits her like lightning, like she can hear that acoustic and taste Alex on her tongue as if it were immediate, one of the few yesterdays she hasn’t worked to forget.

Whoops and wolf-whistles lead into the first riff and Alex starts her sad song, hot and burning like gasoline poured on a lonely star.

“Don’t play dumb, Aunt Astra,” Kara says, grabbing her notebook and chugging the last of her water. She throws the strap of her purse over her shoulder, and Astra wonders just how much her hurt must show. “It really doesn’t suit you.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

“You want lunch?” Alex asks.

It’s 11 a.m. on a Sunday, so everyone with a business or who knows anyone’s business or who cares about their business being known… well, they’re in church. Not one restaurant in this town is open, so a lunch request sounds strange. And they’re already going to see each other at Eliza’s in a day or so, then, there was last night, with the song, and the toast, and Alex’s stare, as if she’d taken some sci-fi photon ray gun and beamed it right into Astra’s pupils. No escaping Alex’s stare, and certainly no escaping the guilt that came with it.

Dinner will certainly be awkward with the pair of them, with J’onn and Alex’s mom and Kara and Winn, the other lab tech out at the DuPont plant where they treat the seeds and test the herbicides. Cat Grant might show up with James, the reporter Grant had requisitioned from up Metropolis way for the feature on rural life. A bunch of loosely connected people Astra would be forced to make nice with, who all knew an IED blew her sense of cordiality straight to hell.

“Wh—what?”

“Put some pants on, I’ve got sandwiches.” Alex looks down at Astra’s bare legs, the overlarge blue flannel she got from the consignment shop, and the obvious bags beneath her blood-shot eyes. She’s probably not even hungover yet, probably _still drunk_ from her turn on the bottle after Kara left and she started shutting everything down. J’onn had loaded up Alex’s equipment and shot Astra a warning look when Alex came by to speak to her before she left, and that look alone was incentive enough to break out a bottle. But last night, when Alex touched her arm, she’d drawn closer out of instinct. This morning, she feels embarrassed and woozy, because Alex looks damn-near _chipper_ after a night of Corona Extras and limes and peanuts.

“Alex, I can’t—”

“Why not? Where do you have to be?”

“What the hell is this?” Astra balks at the soft way Alex asks after her. “Why are you… Kara told me you’re applying out at DuPont. That lab tech position—”

“Astra.” Alex moves her hands to either side of her face and holds Astra in her gentle clutches, way too close for two women standing in the doorway of a side street only two blocks down from First Presbyterian and catty-corned from Saint Joe’s. Alex looks like she might kiss her, but she doesn’t; Alex just holds her fingers carefully against her jaw until Astra’s eyes close, until she unclenches her fists and her shoulders loosen. She sheds whatever emotional armor she’d donned upon Alex’s return, resigning herself to the utter inevitably of the woman holding her cheeks.

“I packed us a picnic, and I really want to talk to you.”

“…why me?” Astra asks, knowing the answer, but not believing it.

“Get dressed,” Alex commands, dropping her hands and sidestepping inside the back room of the bar where Astra’s been sleeping on a lumpy couch for years. “I’ll tell you when there’s some sunshine on your face again.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

“I know you don’t like Mom’s with the pecans and the grapes in the chicken salad, so I did the celery and cranberries instead,” Alex says, propping herself up against the trunk of a tall, thin pine.

They’re at the edge of a clearing on County Line Road 348, maybe 20 miles northeast of town and close enough to the hunting property that the trees look thick as curtains, heavy, velvety softness of needles and sap and forest at their backs, shade near their boots, ants trying to sneak off with crumbs from Alex’s pack at the corner of an old afghan with wood ducks and lily pads sewn in brown, tan, and green design.

“Thank you.”

Alex bites into her own sandwich and wipes mayo from her lip. She’d led Astra to her bike and told her to hold tight, keep her head down (because she didn’t have an extra helmet), and try to enjoy the ride. It was soothing, the wind around her hair, watering her eyes, waking her up like ice dumped on an unsuspecting sleeper. Alex smelled like dollar store soap and gasoline. Even her clothes were free of the cigarette scent that seemed to seep into every cotton crevice. And now the sun rolled over hills before them as they munched on cucumber slices and individual bags of crumbly salt-and-vinegar potato chips.

“So,” Astra says, reaching for the liter bottle of water Alex had brought for them to share. “You’re staying?”

“Yeah,” Alex says, taking the bottle once Astra screws the cap back and tilts it in her direction. “It’s time.”

“You love the road.”

“The road doesn’t love me.” Alex takes a swig of water and puts the bottle at her side, sliding closer near their prop on the tree trunk.

“And you think this place does? Love you, I mean?”

Alex snorts, derisive and short, and brings one hand up to wipe a trickle of sweat off the back of her neck.

“This place… places can’t love people. And when you put all of yourself into an unsustainable lifestyle—”

“You’re giving up?”

“Nah, wising up, I guess.”

“You play really well, though.”

“I’m mediocre at best.”

“No, you’re not. The way you sound, like you _mean_ it… you could be something, Alex. You… you are.”

“I’ve heard other acts,” Alex mutters, moving her sweaty palm to rest over the back of Astra’s hand. She doesn’t motion for Astra to move, to turn her wrist so they can wrap their fingers up like they belong together, or like they need the lifelines to tether them to reality. Alex keeps staring ahead and Astra doesn’t acknowledge the movement. It might break them. It might heal them. But they can’t figure out which way they’ll turn out—great, terrible, and no coin to flip in the forest to tell them the odds for success are slim at best. The pair of them, so damn in love, and much too broken for mending.

“Listen,” Alex sighs, “I’m as middle-of-the-road as they come.”

“Not to me.”

“Yeah?”

“Of course,” Astra confesses, wondering, if in all their time together, Alex never really knew. Wind blows through the branches and Astra hears trees creak, smells dollar store soap, feels callused fingertips pressing into her knuckles. She inhales once and in the wild silence, war seems like eons and galaxies away.

“You’re a better singer than me…” Alex says, finally moving, twisting, a simple turn of her head to lock eyes with Astra, to render her completely defenseless. “They’d come to hear you, too.”

“People here don’t love me like they love you, though.”

“I love you,” Alex says, and Astra digs her nails into the dirt beneath Alex’s hand, wondering if she can anchor herself to the soil like roots, like the veiny networks of longevity that keep massive, sprawling trees hitched to one spot forever.

“You shouldn’t say that, Alex.”

“Well, I did. And it’s how I feel, and I want to stay to show you that.”

“You’re… you’re staying for me?”

“I’m staying for _me_ ,” Alex answers, eyes shimmering in the sunlight. “Getting sober just helped me stop fucking up, and I realized I wanted to be where Kara was. I like playing, and I like my gigs, but some of the bands I toured with just—it wasn’t a life I could keep up if I wanted to see the sun every morning. If I wanted to come back and see my mom… and you.”

“You were embarrassed,” Astra argues, not letting something this easy slip into her reach. It’s gotta be an ambush, right? A distraction from the bigger attack? This kind of happiness isn’t something she can just _have_. “You couldn’t even look at me when I was going down—when you wanted me to—”

“I was so strung out I saw double. Don’t… don’t hold me to what I was.”

A sickening, fleeting image of herself and Alura beside Alex, pale and limp and dying on the floor, flashes through her brain like a flare in the night, a brief signal, but it’s eventually lost. Astra can’t recall if she’s told Alex that her sister was also her twin, since Astra likes to share as little about herself as she can to get by. It’s just an insecurity manifest once again—that the foot soldier somehow came home after hurling herself into the most dangerous missions, when the better of the two sisters died slowly and early from a disease with no cure.

“So the lab position?”

“Steady money, and J’onn’s been begging me to get back on site for years,” Alex explains. “I’m not dumb, never have been, but he couldn’t help me when I was… you know.”

“Does Kara know? That you’re staying?”

“I think she put it together, when I asked after J’onn and she saw the application in my bag. I was gonna tell everyone Tuesday,” Alex says, “when we’re at mom’s?”

“Why me first?”

“Cause I need to know you’d want me here.”

“You can stay wherever you want,” Astra moves her hand away from Alex’s grip to cross it over her chest and pulls her knees into her torso. “This place…it’s your place, Alex.”

“I don’t need a _place_ , Astra, god,” Alex says. “I need people who don’t want to see me dead, for one. I thought you might be—no, no, it _is_ you. You’re it for me, you know?”

“People will talk.”

“ _Fuck_ people.”

Astra grimaces. “…I do. You know I do.”

“So stop. I’ll have a job, we can… we can be something together, uh… move in, if you want.”

“How am I… you know I’m… dammit, Alex, I’m so fucked up, please don’t do it for me, don’t be here for me—”

“Because you think you don’t deserve it?” Alex asks, pressing into Astra’s side, her lips at her neck. “Because you think I’m what? Settling? For a mathematician and a traveler and some genius strategist who rarely lets the world see her… it couldn’t be anyone else but you, Astra.”

“Alex, I…” Astra turns under the trees and her lips meet Alex’s ear, her finger find the ribbed white cotton of her tank, and her voice finds words it never meant to say. “I love you more than life, darling girl, and I wish I could help you rest easy.”

“It’s you… it always has been.”

 

* * *

 

 

Fucking Alex Danvers is a past time, but never monotonous, never _boring_. It’s love, she knows it, but Astra hardly ever says it, because she doesn’t deserve it.

And god, when Alex Danvers fucks _her_ … turn it all in, because Astra isn’t thinking, let alone moving of her own accord. There’s leather and kisses and thrusting so hard she might just burst, silicone and thickness and the sting of slapping competition, of a need to be handled rough to showcase her own fragility. Alex behind her with her harness, in and out like fulfillment, like a hard line of bliss. Alex brings her hand down and Astra gasps, her flesh pinks, and she pushes back against Alex harder and faster—forces Alex to control them both (Alex grips her hips so tight they bruise and pumps steady and sure and perfect _perfect_ PERFECT! **)** until Astra knows nothing more than Alex filling her, pinching her breast, yanking her hair, a fingertip clawing into a dimple of saliva, fucking her so good she forgets men and tragedy and knows nothing but Alex forever, always, Alex inside of her and consuming her soul.

Astra cries out, she collapses, and then she turns over with Alex still inside her. She rises, a gleam of satisfied challenge in her eyes. She pushes back and rides Alex until the woman can no longer prop herself up on her elbows, crying ‘Astra’ and ‘fuck it’ louder than she should.

Alex unbuckles the contraption and it slips from her sides, and soon enough Astra slides against Alex, bare and wet and raw, undulating like salt water, like rejuvenation. And Alex takes it, loves it, the way her sighs echo against thin motel walls so that neighbors know exactly what’s going on, the way Astra lifts one heel high to grind and growl into the middle of them both. And it’s their deal from four years ago come to meaning more, come to flourishing. Because Alex is sober and clear-headed and wants her, and Astra is fine with taking undeserved affection. They kiss now, when before they hadn’t, but Astra’s fingers twitch and Alex writhes, trading one digit for a tool so that Astra can bear down atop her, hips snapping in rhythm to sustain their consummation.

“Fuck me, yeah, keep on—Astra, _fuck!_ —Astra!”

So when she kisses Alex hard enough to suffocate, and grips her tight enough to bruise, Astra feels no guilt. Alex wants her, in all her possessive, obsessive fury, and wears every bite and bruise like an emblem, a sash, like something to be proud of. Alex likes handprints on her throat, and Astra is happy to oblige.

She digs fingers into Alex’s ass when she asks her: “You want me to—”

“Harder, god, _please make me feel_ —”

“Alex, oh… mine, my Alexandra—”

“Fuck me harder, don’t stop, don’t you fucking stop—”

“What do you want?” Astra lives for feedback, how to improve, how to infiltrate with efficacy. “How do you wanna feel me inside you? You want me to turn you over again? You want me to ravage you?”

“Oh, please… _God_ …”

“Alex…”

There’s nothing fluid or synchronized about their desperate rutting, or the friction, or the violent kind of love they make. It’s theirs and it’s raw, until Alex comes and Astra doesn’t relent, dipping to taste and swallow what she’s done to her lover.

And when they break because they must, they have to, their high cannot be sustained, Astra smokes her shorts near the door of the motel and flaps her hand against the air because this room is non-smoking, and neither of them can afford an extra fee on top of the few hours they paid for out here in the middle of nowhere.

“You wanna share, soldier?” Alex asks, padding over to take a drag, deep and slow, puffing dragon-like in the high-heat of the afternoon. Astra had taken the sheet so Alex was left bare, save for slipping her panties back on, but that doesn’t cover the worst of the bruising, or the bites, or any of the other scars Alex has taken from her other addictions.

“You keep taking my things and never giving them back,” Astra gripes.

“Name one thing.”

“My heart,” Astra says, serious as the grave, nuzzling into Alex’s side as they stand bare and look out over the Texas gothic: the backside of the motel faces an empty parking lot with a chain-link fence and hills that roll up to the gas stations and fast food chains with signs that rise high and grotesque at the intersection of the Interstate.

Astra pushes Alex against the doorjamb and wants to breathe her in like nicotine. She fits her fingers in Alex’s ribs and kisses her bitten lips, moves the hand of their shared cigarette up to her mouth and puffs from Alex’s fingers, until Alex grips her hidden left arm and stares, thunderstruck, at the painted black skin from underneath the band of her watch, hidden on the inside of Astra's wrist, beneath sleeves and her usual leather band.

 _Alexandra_ inked into her skin in curled script, a hasty decision made after Alex left her last year. Alex smiles and presses her mouth against the tattoo, and then against the long scar in the middle of her chest. And she kisses the inked numbers of her platoon tattoo and the tiny, single star at her hip. She kisses and kisses and ends up on her knees in the open air, sucking and licking and making sure Astra enjoys the smoldering remnants of their last cigarette.

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> i was listening to this great album and just couldn't get an AU like this out of my head but also i'm sorry cause this was so fast i didn't really proofread it much so sorry for inconsistencies or typos i just gotta get it out to go back and work on coffee shop AU!!!!!


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